22 December 2008

Well the 3.0.8 patch didn't drop on Tuesday. If it's not tomorrow, I would bet it'll come on 30 Dec. A couple notes to my earlier 3.0.8 post:

Regarding the Starfall change: evidently, the tactic of concern was to pop Starfall and change into Travel form. You could bop around at speed and drop stars on quite a few enemies. I don't really think this was a big deal — the cheetah is pretty squishy — but I can see where it'd be painful in arena. Either way, I'm OK with the nerf here.

Regarding Polearms: Evidently the current best-in-show polearm is [Black Ice], which drops from Malygos in both Normal and Heroic. Still nothing for caster druids.

An update on Wild Growth: Official talk now is about a possible change that would allow Wild Growth to benefit Nourish as other HoTs do. That would be pretty cool. I keep wanting to like Nourish. It's a handy spell to have, and I think we'll find a good bit of use for it. But as Phaelia has shown, it isn't really advantageous either in efficiency (HPM) or sheer healing throughput (HPS). The WG/Nourish change would really benefit Nourish as a raid heal, especially from painful burst AoE damage. Here's hoping that it goes through.

Other than that, not a whole lot to report. Had a fun weekend, with runs into regular Halls of Lightning and Culling of Stratholme, and heroic Nexus (good) and Violet Hold (not so good). In Heroic VH we got stuck on the first boss, who was Xevozz for us. With three spheres we'll really have to work out our strategy for DPSing on the move. After three or four wipes — including once when we didn't realize a player was AFK — we gave up on it and ran Nexus instead. The good news is that Nexus appears to be very doable on Heroic. We did struggle with Keristrasza, probably because our DPS was moving/jumping too much, gimping DPS more than required.

Next up for me: complete the Merrymaker achievements, including runs into Ahn'kahet for the hat for Tis the Season, and run battlegrounds With a Little Helper from My Friends. Curious to see how annoying that will be — it kinda sucks to be a druid that can't shapeshift. Probably the best option will be to heal like crazy on defense in AV or something similar.